SBE-UKRI: Collaborative Research: The Role of Environment in Social Transformation

考古学家研究了社会崩溃，努力揭示导致长期政治制度崩溃的多种社会、政治和环境因素。然而，主要问题仍未得到解答。跨学科研究假设潜在的严重干旱事件可能在这一过程中发挥重要作用。尽管古气候记录中存在强烈的模式，但精英和非精英群体如何应对干旱的影响尚不清楚。研究表明，在不同的地理区域，随着遗弃时间的不同，崩溃可能会有所不同，这可能代表了每个地点不同的人口决策过程。在某些情况下，住区能够在几次干旱中持续存在，尽管其生存机制尚不清楚。这些问题与当前的气候挑战有关，因为过去的模式可以作为过去社会成功或不成功地适应气候影响的教训。该奖项将促进国际合作和进一步培养学生。该项目将以一种超越“干旱导致崩溃”的简单叙述的方式确定人类对气候挑战的反应，以确定当人口面临气候不稳定时采取了哪些适应策略。为了了解人类对气候变化的反应，研究人员问：在极端干旱的情况下，人口是如何改变他们的土地利用策略的？他们是如何在崩溃后继续占领的？他们改变了耕种和生活的方式吗？这些问题将通过检查埋葬的数量和时间来解决，以衡量人口规模如何随着时间的推移而变化。将对文物和纪念性建筑进行评估，以了解人们如何根据贸易和建筑事件决定使用他们的资源，以及这些资源如何随着气候压力而变化。环境将利用湖泊沉积物中的地球化学和微化石（花粉、木炭和藻类残留物）特征来重建，这些特征记录了它们沉积时周围环境的性质。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Archaeologists have studied societal collapse, working to unravel the multiple social, political, and environmental factors that contributed to the breakdown of long term political systems. Yet, major questions remain unanswered. Interdisciplinary research has postulated that potentially severe drought episodes may play an important role in this process. Despite the strong patterns in the paleoclimate record, it is less clear how elite and non-elite populations responded to the impacts of drought. Research has demonstrated that the collapse can be varied with the timing of abandonment different across geographic regions likely representing distinct decision-making processes of populations for each site. In some cases settlements are able to persist through several droughts although the mechanisms of that survival are not well-understood. These issues are relevant to current climate challenges, as past patterns may serve as lessons from past societies that successfully or unsuccessfully adapted to the impacts of climate. This award will further international collaboration and further training of students.This project will identify the human responses to climatic challenges in a way that moves beyond the simple narrative of 'drought caused collapse' to determine what adaptation strategies were adopted as a population faced climate instability. To get at the human responses to climate variation, the reseachers ask: How did a population change their land use strategies in the event of extreme drought? How did they continue occupation following a collapse? Did they change how they farmed and lived? These questions will be addressed by examining the numbers and timing of burials to gauge how population sizes changed through time. Artifacts and monumental construction will be assessed to understand how people decided to use their resources with respect to trade and construction episodes and how these changed with climate pressures. Environments will be reconstructed using geochemical and microfossil (pollen, charcoal and algal remains) signatures in lake sediments that archive the nature of the surrounding environments at the time they were deposited.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.